An issue of variance

AMD just sent along an email to the press with a new driver to use for Radeon R9 290X and Radeon R9 290 testing going forward. Here is the note:

We’ve identified that there’s variability in fan speeds across AMD R9 290 series boards. This variability in fan speed translates into variability of the cooling capacity of the fan-sink.

The flexibility of AMD PowerTune technology enables us to correct this variability in a driver update. This update will normalize the fan RPMs to the correct values.

The correct target RPM values are 2200RPM for the AMD Radeon R9 290X ‘Quiet mode’, and 2650RPM for the R9 290. You can verify these in GPU-Z.

If you’re working on stories relating to R9 290 series products, please use this driver as it will reduce any variability in fan speeds. This driver will be posted publicly tonight.

Great! This is good news! Except it also creates some questions.

When we first tested the R9 290X and the R9 290, we discussed the latest iteration of AMD's PowerTune technology. That feature attempts to keep clocks as high as possible under the constraints of temperature and power. I took issue with the high variability of clock speeds on our R9 290X sample, citing this graph:

The card that AMD sent to me is a stallion. Even if you get it nice and hot before running a test, bringing it down off of that 1000 MHz “wishful thinking” spec, it’s still faster than GeForce GTX 780, and oftentimes GeForce GTX Titan. But the Radeon R9 290X I bought from Newegg is a dud. It’ll drop to 727 MHz and stay there…and the reference cooler still can’t cool it fast enough. The result is that it violates its 40% fan speed ceiling as well. The craziness, then, is that my R9 290 press board is typically faster than my R9 290X retail card. In the benchmarks, you’re going to see numbers for all three.

The claim here was that press sample cards were running at higher sustained clocks, and higher performance as a result, than the retail cards our readers were actually buying. I was currently in the process of getting retail versions of both the R9 290 and the R9 290X from retailers, not partners or AMD, when AMD starting talking about this driver fix they were working on.

Part of the problem for the retail cards appeared to be that fan speeds (measured by RPM rather than percentage) were different from card to card. This graph shows how (before today's driver) the press sample R9 290 card compared to the retail MSI R9 290 card we received today compared in fan RPM, out of the box. We also added in a "normalized" fan speed: increasing the fan speed percentage on the MSI card to 50% that closely matched what our press sample card was spinning at.

The MSI card was running at 2350 RPM under a full gaming load (driver claiming 47%) while the press sample was instead running at nearly 2550 RPM under the same 47% indication. Clearly a 200 RPM difference means a lot! It allows the Hawaii GPU to stay cooler, longer, to create higher sustained clock speeds at 95C and that will result in better overall gaming performance.

Keep in mind that even though both the MSI and press sample card shown here are reporting 47% fan speeds, they are clearly NOT running at the same speed. In fact, that delta is about 15%. It concerns me that this was able to slip through the cracks of AMD's QA process. And, be assured, this is not an isolated occurance. I have many reports of other retail cards showing similar (and occasionally lower) fan speeds.

This graphic shows the clock speed comparisons (again, BEFORE today's driver). The green line represents the press sample we were given and shows a flat 947 MHz clock rate - the maximum rated clock of the R9 290. But the R9 290 from MSI, even when running at the same fan RPM speed, was dropping to ~850 MHz after just 5-7 mins of gaming. Out of the box, the MSI card was hitting as low as 660 MHz core clock.

So what does the driver today change? I installed it with both the MSI retail card and our press sample of the R9 290 to find out.

I really don't see the reason to buy one of these unless it has an aftermarket cooler or waterblock attached. Why mess with these retarded fan speeds when one could just use a much better cooler? Three fans are better than one right?

You make a great point, that cooler was very impressive. I had almost forgotten about that thing.

I'm guessing the reason they didn't use that exact cooler is that it's too long, but it shouldn't have been hard to downsize it by a few inches.

My personal theory (bear in mind that I haven't poured a tonne of thought or research into this) is that AMD wanted to make good first impressions with a better looking reference cooler. It worked for me, I think it looks fantastic; certainly better than their old design. Unfortunately for AMD, I don't buy based solely on appearance.

at 47% the fan is putting out 50dB, and at 80-100% is probably mid 60dB to 70. As ea1985 said, less you have noise canceling headphones on that is gonna drown out audio of a game. My desktop about 1 ft away is about 38dB of noise which is pretty quiet. turning fans to 100% on my card it goes up to 56-57dB, this is an enclosed case and it was pretty loud. My 780 for reference is eVGA gtx780 ACX. i used driod app on my asus tf300 tablet so how correct the numbers are, are iffy.

i ment where the tablet mic was only about a foot away from the tower. that dB is system as a whole with case fans included. gpu fans rarely ever get louder then overall noise of the system fans cept in high end game like crysis3 with settings all cranked up

Hey guys here is a follow up video to the one I posted yesterday. This time I'm demonstrating the performance of my R9 290x using the newest beta driver from AMD in a Multiplayer macth in Battle Field 4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VicPlkKdRGk

I upgraded a HP Pavilion dv8010 from 98 to XP to Vista now 7. I also had done a clean install. Not being a Tech, found that installing the AMD and ATI drivers there surfaced a problem. I did get it correct at one point and the fan came on and went off. Now something is amiss. When using a "config" utility for AMD get window "up to date" but the installation before had the fan going off now stays on; a bit low, then high to cool. Came across this post and wonder if anyone knows how to find exactly which AMD installation this PC requires. Been fooling around trying to get sound. Not yet though. Thanks for any insight